Tag Archives: Delete Duplicate Images

How to Organize Digital Images and Photos

The issue behind organizing images

Nowadays most users have thousands of images and while organizing few hundred images may not be so difficult it is a headache to organize thousands or even hundreds of thousands photos. Luckily Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder (VSDIF) can help with this task. There is a free download available at the product’s web site so you can download and test the tool before placing an order. VSDIF is the best tool for finding duplicate photos.

Quick tutorial on how to organize images (for novice users)

Once you download and install the duplicate image finder all you need to do is to create a new project and add the folders to be scanned.

Click the New Project button to create a new project. A dialog box will pop-up automatically where you have to select the folder where the images are located. The selected folder will appear in the folders list panel on the right. If you have photos in different locations just use the “Add Folder” (1) button to add more folders.

Some important notes for novice users:

Add only the folders with you own photo collections – not your entire drives. If you add your entire drive all the images that are duplicates will be listed. This means that these results will include images also from applications and from the operating system. Some of those images are intentionally duplicated so deleting them may lead to malfunction in your applications or operating system.

Once the folders are added select the scan method.

Find the Exact Duplicate Images First

Before running a “Visual Compare” use the “100% Identical Files” mode. It is much faster and will list exact duplicates.This will help you to quickly get rid of the exact duplicate files and will reduce the amount of images that will be scanned using the slower “Visual Compare” method.

The default scan method is “Visual Compare” at 95%. Usually this should work best for you and we do not recommend lowering the value below 90% as it will lead to false positives. The levels below 90% can be used by advanced users for certain special types of scans.

Review Duplicate Image Results

Once the tool completes the scan it will list all similar or duplicate images and group them by similarity. Name, path, properties and similarity are listed for ever image in the duplicates grid. The groups are listed in alternating colors for better readability and the group number that the image belongs to is listed on the right.

Mark Duplicate Images for Deleting

Use the “Auto Check” panel in the bottom left corner to mark files automatically. By default it will mark files with smaller dimension and files size meaning that it will keep the images with the best quality. You can change these settings via the check-boxes and the advanced button in this section. Auto-Check will select all images in a group except ONE – the image that will be kept depends on the above settings.

Some important notes for novice users:

Always review the results before deleting or use the MOVE option and make a backup before deciding whether to delete the files permanently or not .

There are plenty of shortcuts in VSDIF that will make things easier while reviewing duplicates. You can use Space Bar for example in order to check/un-check an image. Take a look at the help file for complete list of shortcuts.

You can delete duplicates manually or automatically. Using the “DEL” key you can delete the currently selected image.

Some important notes for novice users:

Use the delete functionality inside VSDIF to delete images. If you have scanned some folders and then later manually remove folders or images using Windows Explorer you will get “Not Found” message inside VSDIF for the missing items as they are no longer present at the location that was available during the scan process.

Once you have reviewed the results and marked the images that you want to remove you have several options. You can move the files to a backup folder before deciding whether to delete the permanently or not. The other option is to delete the file to Recycle Bin from where you can restore them if you have deleted something by mistake. The third options is to PERMANENTLY delete the files. You have to be 100% sure before using this option as there is no way of recovering the deleted files.

Organizing Digital Photos and Images

Organize Photos

In our digital era most people have huge image collections and organizing the photos turns out not to be an easy task. A growing number of devices (cameras, phones, tablets…) are now equipped with image capture capabilities and the quantity of images in an average image collection grows rapidly. The fact that taking a digital picture does not cost anything makes things even worse as those image collections contain multiple shots of the same object, scene or person. Unfortunately this large quantity of files is hard to maintain and costs a lot of disk space.

Organizing Photos by Removing Duplicates

The first important thing to do is to get rid of the duplicates. This task can take ages on large photo collections so using a dedicated tool is a necessity. Luckily Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder by MindGems Inc. can solve the issue instantly. VSDIF is an innovative tool that can recognize similar or duplicate photos even if they are stored in different file formats. The tool supports more than 100 common image formats and more than 300 RAW camera formats. This tool is an industry leader in this field and is used in the medical industry, stock photography web sites, document management systems and many more. While the Corporate version is quite expensive MindGems provides a desktop version which is popular among the professional photographers at a very low cost . A free demo is available for download here.

Organizing Photos by Grouping Similar Images

VSDIF can help with organizing photos also by finding similar images. If photos from the same photo shoot are scattered all over the computer VSDIF will identify them and group them together by similarity. A similarity percentage that can be adjusted to a certain threshold determines how similar the grouped images should be. There is also an option to compare the EXIF date time. This is handy to identify images that are taken in burst mode or images that have close dates and times. The feature works by grouping together images that have delay between the shots smaller than a specified period of time.

Organizing Photos Using Image Search

One of the options in VSDIF is to search for images by providing a sample image. If photos from a photo shoot are moved to a folder and left orphaned the feature will help to easily locate the source folder from where they were moved. It is also useful for finding all the images that contain certain person, scene or object.

Fastest Duplicate Image Finder

Search for Duplicate Images Faster Than Ever

Visual Similarity Duplicate Image Finder 4.7.0.1 is now Windows 8 certified. The application utilizes a new cache system that provides immense speed improvement in the pre-processing stage. The improvement can be up to 1000 (no it is not a typo – thousand times) faster depending on the count of images. Using the new cache system VSDIF can now pre-process 10,000 images in a second. It is strongly recommended to use the new cache system as consequential scans of an image library will be extremely fast.

The best thing regarding the new cache is the fact that it also detects modified files. This means that a file which was cached in a previous scan and has been modified will be identified and re-processed. This ensures that the duplicate image finder will use the latest version of every file even when using the cache system. The new cache system is available also for the “Image Search” feature and will work equally fast. Old cache files were designed for slow storage and computers and are no longer supported.

In addition to the options that were available for excluding files, the improvements in the filtering options now allow to include files based on various criteria. Here are the filtering options:

Duplicate Image Finder Filter

There is a new option “Check All Except First in Group” in the Auto-check feature. An updated browse for folder dialog can be used to navigate to a folder that is pasted from the clipboard. There is a huge speed improvement when loading large project files. The entire change log can be found here.

Image Search

Image Search – How to Find Similar Images

Issues related to image search

While searching for similar images is something simple for every human being it is not something that a computer can easily do. Computers are based on exact sciences like math and physics and comparing data the way a human does is something that requires comprehensive algorithms.
An image in computers is represented by small dots named pixels. The pixels are formed by three color components – red, green and blue the combination of which determines the actual color of the dot. The count of the pixels determines the resolution of the image. Due to the high quantity of data necessary in order to represent a photograph using pixels most of the file formats utilize different compression methods. This means that the actual data stored on your hard drive for the same image in two or more file formats is completely different. This makes it impossible for a duplicate file finder that compare file data to recognize even images that are 100% identical. While it is relatively easy to decode and compare images in different formats, recognizing an object in two different images requires advanced algorithms and a dedicate duplicate image finder.

How image search applications work

The first most important thing for an image search application is to be capable of recognizing and loading of multiple image formats. As already mentioned, in order to extract the real information regarding a photograph the file should be firs decoded and decompressed. Once the images are loaded comes the heavy lifting part. Advanced algorithms are required in order to determine the similarities between the images. Even if the images are slightly edited or re-sized makes it impossible for a computer to compare and match them.

Best image search application

Visula Similarity Duplicate Image Finder is designed with the sole purpose to search and identify similar or duplicate images. It supports more than 500 image formats which includes 300+ RAW camera formats. This guarantees that it will most likely recognize all images even in the largest image collection. VSDIF uses advanced image analysis algorithms in order to detect similarities between images and can recognize the same person on different photographs. The tool can save gigabytes of disk space by removing redundant data. It provides an image search feature that will take one or more sample images and find all the similar images inside an image collection. VSDIF provides highly accurate results and can scan thousands of images within a minute.